Gaining the good stuff as I lose the bad.

life issues

There’s been a bit of a medical crisis in the family this week. I’m not ready to talk about it yet–it’s very personal to me at the moment–but I immediately demonstrated how ill-prepared I am for a crisis by falling apart and asking for better anxiety meds.

But my therapist says, no. Work the self care.

I’m doing a reasonably good job with the self care. I’m lowering my chore/momming standards, I’m taking hot baths, I’ve acquired and started using aromatherapy at night, I’m doing therapy every day, I’m asking for help from people as much as I can. I’m grounding myself.

My therapist recommended a new to me meditation app. It’s not free, which is a shame because you guys surely know that money is always a crisis, even before we talk about the cost of medical care this week. And the cost of self-care. The app is called Calm and I cannot rave about it enough. It’s spectacular. It’s very calming, and it has sleep stories and I have not had any trouble getting to sleep. That aspect of the insomnia is completely gone.

I’m waking up at 3am, 4am every day, which isn’t great, but still. Progress is progress.

If anyone wants to help offset the costs of the crisis, you can paypal me something at my email address: eloisejtaylor@gmail.com You don’t have to but it would mean a lot to me if you can spare a few dollars to help. We’re definitely drowning over here.

I’ve been using things to help me sleep since the divorce, which was 9 years ago. Even when I was pregnant, I was ok because the nausea medication made me sleepy and helped me sleep.

But I can’t do this anymore. So I’m cutting myself off. I went cold turkey. Well. I went cold turkey off the real meds. No ambien, no unisom, but I’m taking melatonin and some sleepytime tea at night.

This is day 3. The first night I had trouble getting to sleep but did it eventually, but then was up at 2:30am and slept fitfully after that.

Last night I got to sleep pretty easily but also had some fitful sleep starting in the early morning. My sleep tracker says I only had 45 minutes of deep sleep last night.

Part of the problem is that the husband has a cold and is coughing, but fortunately the doctor gave him some good cough medicine today and that should reduce the problems going forward.

I feel really tired today. Not groggy like I often do on the meds, but tired and more depressed than usual. The internet says that’s a common reaction to going off the sleep medication, but that it should pass in a week or so.

It’s really hard, but it’s an important step to getting healthy and functional.

I recently read Ann Rule’s true crime classic, The Stranger Beside Me. It’s the Ted Bundy story, which is so interesting to me. Specifically, I think it’s interesting that we all know Ted’s name, and John Wayne Gacy’s, and Dahmer’s, but we don’t know the names of other serial killers that had higher numbers of people killed, like Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer.

Why is that?

I’m not sure. But what was very interesting to me about the book was Ted Bundy’s narcissism. He’s often considered the prototypical narcissist. I have an interest in narcissism since my ex was listed as likely having narcissistic personality disorder and was referred for further testing, which he never did. And indeed, when you read about narcissism, it’s a portrait of my ex.

My ex is a terrible person and was abusive to me and to the children, but I do not believe that he is a serial killer, or even a killer at all. And I would be incredibly surprised if you told me that he was. His sense of self-preservation is stronger than his belief that he is too smart to catch, which doubtless saved my life many times.

Narcissism isn’t just self-centeredness. It’s more than that. It’s the absolute and unwavering belief that you are always right and never make mistakes. The shrink that diagnosed my ex said that therapy would be useless for him because he can’t admit he’s done anything wrong and as a result he can’t grow.

It’s the belief that you are different than other people. Better than other people.

Part of the fun for narcissists is to manipulate other people. Sometimes he would lie about things that were completely trivial, not worth lying about. I distinctly recall a lie about getting milk from the store, for example.

And he does this other thing I could never understand, and I got a chill when, near the end of the book, Bundy did the same thing.

My ex sometimes will tell you he’s thinking about doing something or about agreeing to something, when actually he had already done that thing. For example, earlier this year he cornered me at a school event to discuss the older child’s proposed science fair project, which he did not like, and he said, I think I might let her do it anyway, because she has to learn to fail if she makes bad choices. But I found out later that at the time he said that, he had spent several days emailing her science teacher expressly forbidding the project entirely.

Near the end of the book, Bundy says to Rule, I’m thinking of writing to the detectives in Seattle and offering my help with the Green River Killer case. That was said to her in 1986. Later it came out that he had been in contact with the police about the Green River Killer since 1984.

I don’t understand why. I don’t know what they get from that. Is it just another level of subterfuge? Another barrier between the world and their real life? I don’t know.

It’s just so creepy and disturbing to me to see correlations between the best known serial killer in history and the man I lived with for eight years.

I’ve been struggling with some hard core depression for about a month now and last week that was joined by a return of the most hard core anxiety situation that I can remember, for a period of almost 4 days.

This was the real deal–chest pain, trouble breathing, digestive issues–for almost 4 days. Days during which I had to do things, like care for an infant and pick up older children and see people, which was incredibly difficult and made the anxiety much worse. Even with the buspar that I take when the anxiety gets rough I was not in any way ok. I found myself taking meds to make myself sleepier, not to sleep but to calm the anxiety.

It was terrible.

But after a mostly restful weekend I am doing better today, and I have minimal commitments this week, so hopefully that will continue to be true.

Tomorrow I’m scheduled to meet with the integrative medicine lady at my new therapist’s office. Apparently that’s largely acupuncture, which is (unbelievably) covered by my insurance?? I’m not convinced about the acupuncture but am willing to have that conversation, anyway.

I saw the doctor this morning. I asked for an increase in my wellbutrin dosage but instead she’s adding a second med into the current dosage, she thinks that will work better to help alleviate the depression. It’s true that for the last month or so, it has felt like the wellbutrin isn’t working at at all.

I saw the new therapist last week and I’ll see her again tomorrow. She seems fine. It’s a little early to know for sure if it’ll be a really good fit but I think it will. She has a therapy dog, which is nice, because I like dogs. Although I feel guilty about spending time with dogs when my own are not getting walked as much as I’d like.

The doctor also pushed really hard on the exercise concept, she wants me to be exercising far more, ostensibly for my mood. Which is fine, I believe that it is fairly well accepted that exercise helps with mood.

Although it’s obviously much harder to exercise when you’re mired in a depression that will not let go. It’s much easier to wallow and I very much would like to wallow. But I have a baby that needs constant care and that keeps me waking up every morning and doing basic life activities. I make him baby food, I wash dishes and laundry, I sweep the floor, basic things like that to keep him alive and in a good place.

It’s my sincere hope that in time, I will feel better and won’t have to force myself to do things every day.

This is what it’s like, when you have depression. You go through your life and you’re doing ok, and then depression sneaks up on you. It’s like when you watch nature shows and the lion takes out the gazelle.

I do not like being a gazelle in this situation.

What I’m having as an issue right now, though, is the mental paralysis.

You know when you’re smushed up against the side of the car because there’s too many people in it? Or when you’re sitting between two big people on an airplane? And you can’t move properly and you feel trapped?

That’s what my brain is doing.

Think about how hard it is to open your airline snacks when you’re trapped like that, and that’s how hard thinking has been for me this past week or so. It’s like I have to focus and work hard to complete a single thought of any value.

It’s exhausting.

And it’s frustrating, too.

Everything is much harder in this situation. Planning is hard. Talking is hard. Decision making is very hard. It’s all tricky.

The good news is that I have found a new therapist (the old one is not covered by this year’s insurance) and I start on Friday. I hope to have some better thought processes sometime soon.

I got an app called “Moment” back in November and let it run in the background all this time, never opening it. It monitors your cell phone usage, how many hours a day you use your phone, how often you pick it up, and so on.

Last week, I thought, hmmm, what is the story on that? And I opened the app. It’s not good. Most days I was using my phone in the neighborhood of 9 hours. To be fair, much of that was not during times that I was doing baby care–my ongoing insomnia means that I read on my phone for several hours many many nights–but STILL. It’s a terrible situation.

I immediately scaled back. I would get rid of the phone–put it in a drawer all day, anyway–if it wasn’t how I took pictures of the baby (which I do approximately a dozen times a day) but since I do need to have it in my hand for pictures, even in the house I can’t shut it away.

Instead, I scaled it back. I told the phone to stop tracking me between 10pm and 8am, when the baby is almost certainly asleep and that way I’m not getting dinged by my insomniac issues.

I then set a limit on the phone usage, of 5 hours a day. This should be easy to meet, and actually, for most of last week it was easy to meet it. The exception: the day where I was driving most of the day (to the school, to therapy, back to school, to school, to an away track meet, back to the school, home) and I had the phone up for GPS purposes and I also had it running podcasts the entire time.

The other issue is on the weekends when the husband is doing baby care, which is a good time for me to catch up on my reading, which pushes my cell phone use up as well.

I can set the app to exclude the time I spend in specific apps–I would certainly exclude podcasts, because I’m not actively on my phone while they run, either in the house or in the car–but I’d rather bring it back under the time without carving out exceptions.

Every morning I take a screenshot of my battery screen, showing how many minutes I spent in each app the previous day, and the app shows me what I’m doing so I can fix it. It also shows me how often I pick it up: how long between pick ups, how many total times I picked it up, how long I was holding it on average, how many times I was on it for more than 15 minutes, and so on.

It’s hard. I want to pick it up ALL the time. But it’s not insurmountable. I will be more present without my phone addiction and so I’m dedicated to fixing this.